Earlier this year, the KDE team released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop. Instead of bringing evolutionary changes, KDE 4.0 effectively delivered a complete rewrite of KDE, and as a consequence the first release of the KDE 4 branch lacked a lot of features of KDE 3.x, while also being quite unstable and rough. Many even complained the KDE team shouldn't have released KDE 4.0 as 4.0, but rather as a developer preview release or something similar. During this storm of criticism, the KDE team calmly pointed out that KDE 4.1 would fix many, many of the issues people had with KDE 4.0. Starting today, there's no more pointing towards KDE 4.1: KDE 4.1 has been released today.

You mean KDE doesn't choose which font faces and sizes they use? Wow, how odd.

No, is the very simple answer. Fonts are handled separately, and when you see a screenshot it is generally a default base font that is used because you can't depend on what fonts might be installed. However, distributions might very well change the fonts available, the default and the rendering and things will then look better, so it's all rather mute.

I know it's incredibly fashionable at the moment for lots of people to wade in and pick out what they think to be usability and look issues in KDE 4.1 for reasons best known to them ;-). I saw one guy somewhere complain about not being able to see the columns in Dolphin, when the window had merely been resized to enable you to see the rest of the desktop!